Re: [Xtrkcad-fork-developers] C99 on Windows

[Jeffrey C. <jef...@co...>]

There's a simple solution to all this wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Compile the code base as if it were C++.  There's no need to use any of C++'s advanced features.  C is mostly a subset of C++ and most C code will compile as C++ with only minor changes.  In my experience, the only item that usually needs attention is the C++ requirement to explicitly cast void * to specific pointer types.  That is

    int *i = malloc(6*sizeof(int));

needs to be changed to

    int *i = (int *)malloc(6*sizeof(int));

Also note that C++ programs can make full use of legacy C libraries if necessary.

- Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: dmarkle [mailto:dm...@as...] 
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2013 9:05 AM
To: For developer discussion of xTrkCad
Subject: Re: [Xtrkcad-fork-developers] C99 on Windows

On Sat, 16 Feb 2013 14:34:37 +0100, "Martin Fischer"
<mar...@t-...> wrote:
> I'd hate to loose the excellent IDE that Microsoft has though.

The problem being that Microsoft considers C obsolete, isn't making any improvements to it, and as time goes on it has been drifting farther and farther from the current standards. C has continued moving forward, making improvements, and has continued to outstrip C++ in popularity but we're still stuck with ancient MSVC conventions.

Take for instance a change I've been looking to make to fix 64 bit compile warnings in gtkhelp.c:

xtrkcad/app/wlib/gtklib/gtkhelp.c: In function ‘DoHelpMenu’:
xtrkcad/app/wlib/gtklib/gtkhelp.c:705:13: warning: cast from pointer to integer of different size [-Wpointer-to-int-cast]

Recommended way to fix this:

--- a/app/wlib/gtklib/gtkhelp.c	Sat Feb 16 08:43:23 2013 +0100
+++ b/app/wlib/gtklib/gtkhelp.c	Sat Feb 16 08:57:35 2013 -0500
@@ -702,7 +702,7 @@
 static void
 DoHelpMenu( void *data )
 {
-	int func = (int)data;
+	int func = (intptr_t)data;
 	
 	switch( func )
 	{

Microsoft doesn't support intptr_t, which has been part of the new C spec for a decade to improve 64 bit platform support. In this case there's a workaround, but it involves adding more code to every file we need to use
this:

#ifdef _WIN32
typedef signed short intptr_t
#else
#include <stdint.h>
#endif

There's also the point of declarations in blocks which came up in the last few days; that's an improvement to the language that can be used to create more readable code.



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